May 8, 2012

Journalist Fabio Isman wrote on May 4 of the Italian judge's ruling that the Fano Athlete had been smuggled out of Italy and wrongfully sold to the Getty Museum in Il Messaggero in the article titled "l'Atleta del Getty deve essere confiscato."

The 2011 Swedish film "Headhunter" (the English title now playing in theaters in the U. S.) based on the book by Swedish crime writer Jø Nesbo features a corporate management recruiter in Norway who steals art to compensate for his 'bad genes' and -- in his mind -- his less than desirable stature of 'five feet, six inches' (168 centimeters). The protagonist narrates that the money earned from stealing art pays for the lifestyle that allows him to keep happy his beautiful statuesque wife.

In this fictional film, the movie's hero, Roger, obtains information from high-level managers seeking new employment that will enable him to rob the client -- is anyone home during the day? do you have a dog? do you own a valuable work of art? Roger has an accomplice who works at a protective security firm who disengages the residential alarm during the burglary. Roger, in protective clothing, is careful not to leave any DNA evidence and replaces the original artwork with a reproduction before leaving the residence -- all within ten minutes. Roger hides the stolen paintings in the roof of his car then parks in his garage for his accomplice to retrieve and then sell through a fence in Sweden.

Caledonian Boar Hunt by School of Rubens/Rueters Photo

Roger, under financial pressure, is looking for an expensive painting that will allow him to pay off his outstanding debts and finds out through his lovely wife that a man brought a painting by Peter Paul Ruben's that his grandmother received from a German officer during World War II.

Hiding a painting in the lining of the roof of a car is exactly where thieves hid Cézanne's painting "Boy with a Red Waistcoat" discovered by Serbian police last month.

In the film, one of the artworks stolen is that by Edvard Munch; the other painting, The Caledonian Boar Hunt by Peter Paul Rubens, was allegedly lost during the Nazi occupation of Ruben's hometown of Antwerp. A painting similar to the image used in the film and by the same title was discovered in Greece last September. Greece police recovered the 17th century oil sketch ten years after it had been stolen from the Fine Arts Museum of Ghent in Belgium.

May 7, 2012

Governor Spacca and an image of the
Fano Athlete at a press conference
in LA last year

Jason Felch, who has been covering this story since 2006, reported for The Los Angeles Times that on May 3 a judge in Marche confirmed that the J. Paul Getty Museum should return the Fano Athlete to the country from which it was illegally exported.

Felch, co-author of Chasing Aphrodite, posted the judge's ruling on his website here.

On the blog Looting Matters, David Gill encourages The Getty to cooperate before additional legal steps reveal more problems. Gill also provides an overview of the 'collecting history' and Italy's years long political fight on his blog here.

This is the victory Governor Spacca of Marche spoke of when he visited the Getty in March 2011 in an attempt to negotiate a friendly resolution (reported here and here on the ARCA blog).

ARCA Alum '09 Julia Brennan, a textile conservator, was one of the international consultants who helped to develop the Queen Sirikit Museum of Textiles in Thailand.

The institute focuses on preserving and reviving the Thai silk industry.

Here and here are two articles on the Queen's textile museum. Brennan trained the conservation staff, helped design and set up the conservation lab, and worked with the team to treat, prepare and install more than 150 textiles for the inaugural exhibitions.

Virginia Curry and Richard Ellis at Q&A session
at the Southeastern Technical High School, September 2011

Virginia Curry and Richard Ellis, formerly of the FBI and Scotland Yard, respectively, have a new website for Stonehill Art Crime Symposium they will be teaching this summer. (You can read more about this program here on the ARCA blog).

The website address is here. The program also has a twitter account @artcrimeclass for information updates.

In support of the Stonehill Initiative, ARCA is offering a tuition subsidy for its postgraduate certificate program in Art Crime and Cultural Heritage Protection for students who complete the Stonehill short course.

May 4, 2012

As a second generation holocaust survivor, I have concluded that S. 2212, in shielding any government-related foreign institution from ANY liability or suit in the United States for claims for artworks related to cultural exchanges, and subject to pillage, plunder or illegal excavation, is appalling.

In 1998, the Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD) and its members promised to perform in-depth provenance research for their entire collections, during hearings held by Jim Leach, Chair of the House Committee on Banking and Financial Services.

Not only did AAMD fail to honor those commitments, but it is now lobbying to continue the tragedy of the Holocaust and all subsequent genocides, by asking Congress to ensure that theft from owners in times of war and dictatorship and the greed resulting from its commercial exploitation are officially protected from justice.

The so-called Nazi carve-out in the bill gives the illusion that Nazi-looted art claims will be preserved, which is both untrue and unfair.

In London, Julian Radcliffe,
founder of the Art Loss Register, a private company originally funded by auction
houses and insurers to create a database of stolen art, tells Knelman of his
effort to establish a stolen art database for art dealers and auction houses. The company also reported over $200
million in art theft recoveries by 2008, including recoveries of paintings by
Cézanne, Edouard Manet, and Pablo Picasso.

“Famous
paintings are just a small percentage of what is being stolen,” Radcliffe told
Knelman, [adding that] most of the art on the ALR list consists of minor paintings and
antiques, and fewer than 1 per cent of those are ever recovered.

Radcliffe explains that art
dealers often didn’t question why they could purchase a painting cheaply. Sometimes if art dealers found out the
art was reported stolen on ALR, they would not buy the work but refer it to someone
else. Even art thieves like to
search the database to see if a painting has been reported stolen.

In the over
1,000 recoveries Radcliffe has enjoyed, in only three cases was the thief not
after the paycheck for the stolen art, and most of the art that wasn’t
immediately passed on to a dealer or auction house was stored in a vault, a
closet, an attic, or a basement.

“Transactions in
the art world are often carried out anonymously … and this cult of secrecy can
be taken advantage of by criminals,” said Radcliffe. “The art trade is the least regulated and least transparent
activity in the commercial world, and the portability of the times and their
international market make them very attractive for moving value, unobserved.”

Radcliffe said
that the average value of stolen art is under $10,000 and that thieves will
pass these items off to fences, who will then move them into the outlands of
the art market: to small auction houses or galleries, or across oceans…. About
half of all stolen art recovered by the ALR was found in a different country
from where it was originally stolen.

In the United States, Knelmen meets
Special Agent Robert K. Wittman, then a Senior Art Investigator for the Rapid
Deployment Art Crime Team for the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Wittman was six months away from
retirement. The 1996 law, The
Theft of Major Artwork had made it a federal crime to steal from a museum or to
steal a work of art worth more than $5,000 or older than 100 years. Knelman tells how Wittman recovered a
Norman Rockwell painting in Brazil just three months after helping with the recovery effort after the attacks on the World Trade Center.

Knelman meets Matthew Bogdanos
who had lived one block from the WTC on 9/11. The assistant U. S. district attorney, a Marine reservist, led the art theft
investigation of the National Museum of Iraq after looting in 2003, and
established an amnesty program to recover the stolen antiquities.

In the fall of 2009, Knelman
meets Bonnie Magness-Gardiner, head of the Federal Bureau of Investigations’
Art Crime Team which had reorganized in response to the looting of the Iraqi
museum. Magness-Gardiner echoes
what Knelman heard in his first meeting with an art thief in Toronto six years
earlier about an unregulated and undocumented art market based on secretive
transactions involving millions of dollars.

I asked
Magness-Gardiner if it was fair to say that no one had a handle on how large
the black market in stolen art had become. “Yes, that’s fair to say,” she answered.... “When we say ‘black market,’ really
what we mean are those stolen items that are in the legitimate market and
shouldn’t be there. The black
market isn’t separate. So we’re
talking about items that have no history.
The collectors, the museums, and the dealers all partake on some level.”

Magness-Gardiner
explains:

“Art is one of
the biggest unregulated markets in the U. S. The business of art tends to be very closed and
secretive. It is still business
done on a handshake. Financial transactions
are quite difficult to track, because you don’t have a paper trail. How art is bought, sold, and moved is a
challenge in itself to understand.
When a piece of art is bought or sold, there is the movement of the
physical object from one location to another. There is also the transfer of money from one bank account to
another. There is nothing to link
those two events.”

Magness-Gardiner addressed the
lack of information about the collecting history or previous ownership of an
object of art or cultural property:

“Another problem
built into a business-on-a-handshake model is the issue of provenance. The first thing we tell a new agent to
do is to find out whether or not the work of art that has been stolen is, in
fact, real. Where does it come from?
Where are its records? We don’t know until we do a background investigation on
the piece of art.” She continued,
“Looking at the authenticity of a piece is always detective work. Unlike most other material items
manufactured today, art does not have serial numbers. Lack of a serial number is one element that really
distinguishes art from other types of property theft. The only parallel is jewellery and gems – difficult to trace
because they don’t have a serial number either, and so they are particularly
valuable to thieves,” she said.

“The middlemen
and the dealers don’t want other people to know their sources. This can stem from a legitimate
business concern, because if other dealers find out who their sources are, they
could use those same sources.”

Knelman dedicates a chapter to
the art crime investigator, Alain Lacoursière, who had worked on art thefts as
part of his police job until he retired. When Knelman met the new generation of the Quebec Art Squad they didn’t know of the work of the LAPD Art Theft
Detail until Knelman told the French-speaking detectives of Hrycyk’s work.

In Hot Art, Knelman successfully brings a personal narrative
navigating the disparate international world of art theft and recovery that
almost unknowingly tell of the same story of theft and laundering stolen art
through the legitimate market and the limited resources to combat the problem. From England’s first art investigative
team, the Sussex Police’s art and antiques squad, in 1965 to information flourishing
on the internet through blogs such as Art
Hostage (written by the former Brighton Knocker Paul "Turbo" Hendry),
and information dispersed by Interpol, the LAPD’S Art Theft Detail, Quebec’s
Art Crime Squad, and the Museum Security Network, who in the English-speaking
world will be the next law enforcement officers to continue the work of its
pioneers?

In 2008, as economic chaos grips
the bond markets and art prices continue to increase, Knelman interviews Donald Hrycyk of the Los Angeles Police Department; Richard Ellis,
former head of Scotland Yard’s Art and Antiquities Squad; Julian Radcliffe of the
Art Loss Register; FBI Art Investigator Robert Wittman; Matthew Bogdanos who
led the recovery effort for antiquities looted from the National Museum of Iraq
in 2003; Giles Waterfield, the former director of the Dulwich Picture Gallery
who helped to recover “the Takeaway Rembrandt”; and Bob Combs, head of The Getty’s security.

Knelman finds cooperation with
Detective Hrycyk of the LAPD’s Art Theft Detail,
the nation’s only full-time municipal unit dedicated to investigating art-related
crimes. The detective discusses solved cases, methods of investigation, and takes Knelman to the evidence warehouse. Knelman recounts Hrycyk’s
background from patrolling the streets of South Central Los Angeles to the
detective’s patient and precise work investigating art thefts. In 2008, Hrycyk was training his
partner, Stephanie Lazarus, just as his former boss and mentor, Bill Martin, had
trained Hrycyk 1986 to 1989.

In Los Angeles
in the mid-1980s, art theft was a hidden crime, blending many different worlds. It cut across socio-economic lines and
could move in a heartbeat from blue-collar to white-collar criminals. A thug who knew nothing about art
except that it was valuable could steal a painting; that same afternoon, the
painting could wind up in the possession of an auction house; within the week
or the month, it could be sold to one of the Los Angeles art elite.

In addition to visiting art
galleries, auction houses, and museums, Hrycyk read the 1974 book by Laurie Adams, Art Cop, about the work of a former
undercover New York City narcotics officer, Robert Volpe, who was probably the
first detective in North America to investigate art theft full-time. Knelman writes:

Volpe’s
investigations included burglaries, robberies, and consignment frauds – when an
artist or patron would lend a piece of work to a gallery and the gallery would
vanish or refuse to return the art.
He believed that art theft in New York in the 1970s had reached the same
stage as narcotics a decade earlier.

Hrycyk tells Knelman that the
unregulated art world (just like the drug dealers Hrycyk arrested for years) relied
upon a code of ethics where not asking for information seems to be part of that
world’s business practices. Buyers
and sellers of art use middlemen just as drug dealers do. “It is considered rude to ask questions
about the provenance of an artwork – who owned it, where it came from. Embarrassment is often one of the
leading factors for secrecy,” Hrycyk tells Knelman.

Martin retired in 1992 but it
wasn’t until two years later that Hrycyk returned to the Art Theft Squad to work
with a rotating string of partners until he chose Lazarus to train in
2006. Hot Art opens with a chapter on a ride-a-long with Hrycyk and
Lazarus to the crime scene at an antiques store on La Cienega and recounts the
detectives’ investigation. A year
later, Lazarus would be arrested for the murder of her ex-boyfriend’s wife and
this year she was convicted of the crime.
Hrycyk, one of the most senior officers of the LAPD, has no successor to
continue the investigative work built upon two decades of contacts in the art
market.

Knelman’s sister, a student at
the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, introduces her brother to her thesis
advisor Giles Waterford who had been the curator at the Dulwich Picture Gallery
in 1981 when “the takeaway Rembrant” was stolen for the third time. Rembrant’s very small painting titled Jacob de Gheyn III is an example of
“Headache art” which attracts significant media attention. Waterfield recounts his negotiations
with a German businessman for a “Finder’s Fee” that leads to the recovery of
the painting.

Paul "Turbo" Hendry tells Knelman
that ‘there was one detective in London, in particular, who made his reputation
dealing with headache art cases’, Richard Ellis, the man who re-started
Scotland Yard’s Art and Antiques Squad.

As a detective,
Ellis had been involved in a number of high-profile cases, including reclaiming
a Vermeer from a criminal organizer in a chase that lasted seven years and
spanned half a dozen countries.
That case was chronicled thoroughly in The Irish Game: A True Story of Crime and Art, by Mathew Hart.

Ellis’ interest in art theft
began with the burglary of his parents’ home in 1972 and the subsequent
recovery of his family’s property at the Bermondsey Market, London’s
Friday-only open market of junk and antiques. Ironically, Ellis was never allowed to work on the
Philatelic Squad that evolved from investigating crimes in the stamp market to
the unregulated antiques industry that operated as Scotland Yard’s first Art
and Antiques Squad. Knelman recounts
Ellis’ strategy of reopening the department in 1989 after it had been closed
for five years. Ellis cases included the recovery of paintings stolen from the
Russborough house in 1986; the 1994 recovery of Edvard Munch’s The Scream stolen from Norway’s National
Gallery; and Jonathan Tokeley-Parry’s smuggling of antiquities out of Egypt in
the 1990s. Knelman writes:

For Ellis, the
Russborough case provided the link between stolen art and organized crime,
diamond dealers, and a network that stretched across Europe. The Schultz case, which involved 14
countries on four continents, proved that the stolen art network was
sophisticated and involved criminals at all levels of the trade, from the men
who dig in the dirt to the men in the shops and galleries on Madison Avenue.

Ellis retired
from Scotland Yard in 1999. ‘He
told me that his success as a stolen-art detective was primarily due to his
ability to gather information. He
relied on a network of informants to keep him abreast of what was happening in
the criminal underworld. His squad
of detectives paid cash for useful information. “Every Friday the calls would come in. Payday,” Ellis explained.

Sotheby's sold Evard Munch's "The Scream" for $119.9 million in New York City tonight.

Lot #20, identified from the 'Property of the Olsen Collection', a pastel on board in the original frame, measures 32 by 23 1/4 inches, executed in 1895, and signed 'E. Munch' and dated in the lower left corner. It is one of four versions of an man with an open mouth, his hands clasped to the side of his head, recognizable to even middle school children. The artist lived from 1863 and to 1944.

According to Sotheby's provenance information, Arthur von Franquet purchased the work in 1895. The Berlin banker and Jewish art collector Hugo Simon had acquired it by 1926 and by October, 1993, Mr. Simon had left the painting on consignment with the art dealer Jacques Goudstikker in Amsterdam. Simon left it with the Kunsthaus Zürich by December 1936. Then it was on consignment for sale by Simon in January 1937 with M. Molvidson, Konst & Antikvitetshandel in Stockholm where Thomas Olsen, the current owner's father, purchased it.

Jori Finkel for The Los Angeles Times reported that the price of $119.9 million set the record for the most expensive artwork sold at auction:

The identity of the buyer, who was bidding by phone during the 12-minute auction, has not been confirmed. Bidding started at $40 million, with at least five bidders.

Today the Holocaust Restitution Project posted a link on its Facebook page to an article in a German newspaper that the great grandson of Hugo Simon, now living in Brazil, told the newspaper "Die Welt" that the painting had been sold "out of necessity" when his family fled from Germany during the Nazi era. the Holocaust Restitution Project documents property losses at the hands of the National Socialists and their allies across Europe from 1933 to 1945.

Interpol and UNESCO listed art theft as the fourth-largest black
market in the world (after drugs, money-laundering, and weapons). But
what did that mean? After I’d been following [Bonnie] Czegledi’s career for several
years, one point was clear: don't look at the Hollywood versions of an art thief -- the Myth. This is a bigger game, with more players, and the legitimate
business of art is directly implicated. A lot of the crimes are hidden in
the open. Stealing art is just the beginning. Then the art is
laundered up into the legitimate market, into private collections, into the
world's most renowned museums.

-- Joshua
Knelman, author of Hot Art

Toronto journalist Joshua Knelman, author of Hot Art: Chasing Thieves and Detectives Through
the Secret World of Stolen Art (Tin House Books,
2012), introduces to the general
reader the international problem of art crime and the limited resources of
legal authorities in fighting this problem in the first decade of the 21st
century.

In
2003, Knelman was just a 26-year-old researcher for the Canadian magazine Walrus when he stumbled down the rabbit
hole of art theft and recovery. A
gallery owner hesitant to speak about the theft of $250,000 worth of
photographs stolen two years earlier opens up to Knelman after police recover part of the stolen artwork. Knelman eventually contacts the suspect’s lawyer, and that leads to a midnight phone call from the
thief who has been investigating Knelman. The two meet in a café in
Toronto. The aspiring reporter is physically
threatened, given stolen art, and then lectured by the thief about how the
secretive business practices in the legitimate art market actually supports art
crime. Thus begins Knelman’s
adventures through the world of thieves and investigators of looted art.

The journalist befriends Bonnie Czegledi, a Toronto attorney specializing
in art crime, who educates Knelman about the types of stolen art and cultural
property: missing Holocaust-looted artworks; pillaging of antiquities from
source countries such as Egypt, Afghanistan, and Turkey; multi-million dollar
thefts from museums worldwide; and unreported thefts from galleries and
residences. Knelman writes:

The world’s cultural heritage had become one big
department store, and thieves of all kinds, at all levels, were shoplifting
with impunity, as if the one security guard on duty was out on a smoke break.

Ten years ago when Knelman first met Czegledi,
tools to recover stolen art included Interpol’s stolen art database; the
International Council of Museum’s guidelines for the buying practices of
museums; the International Foundation for Art Research; and the Art Loss
Register.

For example, Knelman relates that a curator at the Royal Ontario
Museum was offered the chance to buy some Iraqi antiquities (the institution declined). This was after the National Museum of Iraq was looted in 2003 and about 25 years after Canada had signed the 1970 Convention barring importing stolen artwork across international borders.

Knelman points out that only a handful of detectives worldwide have
the expertise and training to investigate art thefts – from the pairs of police
officers located in Montreal and Los Angeles to the larger European squads in
England and Italy.

In
2005, Knelman’s published an article in The
Walrus, “Artful Crimes” which highlights art crime in Canada against an
increasingly global and transnational problem. But he wasn’t done with the story. Two years later, Knelman paid his own way to join cultural attorney Czegledi at
the International Ccouncil of Museum’s conference in Cairo. American prosecutor Rick St. Hilaire
guides him through Egyptian history of ancient art crimes and summarizes the
problem of smuggling of antiquities today which Knelman smartly summarizes in
his book. Knelman also meets Alain
Lacoursière, the police officer that initiated the study of art crime in Quebec,
while dodging an Egyptian conference organizer who demands the journalist pay a
higher rate on his hotel room – Knelman sleeps on the floor in another room to
avoid paying the organizer his cut.

By 2008, Knelman has a contract to write an investigative book on the
mysterious and increasingly violent black market for stolen art. He goes online to
find an art thief interviewed by the magazine Foreign Policy. He tracks downPaul
Hendry, a Brighton knocker who graduated to handling millions of dollars in
stolen paintings and antiques. “We
struck up what turned out to be a three-year conversation,” Knelman
writes. “We started to talk once,
twice, sometimes three times a week.”

“It was easy to
make a living from stealing art, according to Paul, if a thief made intelligent
choices, if he stayed below a certain value mark – about $100,000. Less was better. Don’t steal a van Gogh. To someone who knew how to work the
system, the legitimate business of fine art became a giant laundry machine for
stolen art. You could steal a
piece and sell it back into the system without anyone being the wiser.”

“It’s called
‘pass the hot potato,’” Paul told me.
“A dealer sells it on to the next dealer, and the next, until nobody
knows where it came from. It’s a
fantastic system! And that system
is the same wherever you are. It
doesn’t matter if you’re talking about London, New York or New Delhi,” he
explained. “Art is something you
have to think about as a commodity that goes round in circles. The only time it appears in the open is
when someone tries to filter it into the legitimate art market – auctions, art
fairs, gallery sales, dealers.
Otherwise it’s hidden away inside someone’s home.”

Hendry grew up in Brighton and
learned his outlaw trade as a “Knocker” who talked elderly residents out of their art and antiques. Since 1965 Sussex Police had been responding to a high
number of residential burglaries and created England’s first Art and Antiques
Squad that operated until 1989.

According to Paul, in the 1960s
Brighton closed down a large open-air market and built a huge shopping mall,
Churchill Square. Produce vendors
started going door to door, which created opportunities to buy “good
junk.” They became known as “knockers”.

Knockers sold
“junk” to antique dealers at a price higher than they had paid for it. Knocking turned into a devious game
that allowed thieves to peek at the inventory inside the houses of the upper
middle class.’

Hendry tells Knelman of his poor
and chaotic childhood, his training on the streets of crime, and how he hires
local men from the neighborhood bar to break into
homes and steal family treasures that Hendry can then sell.